laptop

[ronetone]

i have an old Gateway Solo 1200 laptop all it has is a cd-rom i wanted to know if i could upgrade from the cd-rom to a dvd-rom?

 

[cy7878]

call Gateway to see if one is(was) offered then check ebay to see if you can find one. But if the computer is less than a P2-300, you can't play movies.

 

[ronetone]

its a Intel 800 MHz Celeron Processor 128MB SDRAM 8MB 4X AGP 3D Video will this be able to play dvds?

 

[cy7878]

yes

 

[funggorgor]

you may also consider external pcmcia dvd-rom drive

 

[ronetone]

well i was going to put this laptop in my car as a dvd player since i don't use it anymore

 

[thraxes]

For this Laptop all you need is a Slimline drive which you can buy at NewEgg or any other place that sells the things.

The next hurdle is finding out the master/slave encoding of the existing drive. Slimline drives DON'T HAVE MASTER / SLAVE / CS jumpers! This stuff is done in the drives firmware, for which the manufacturers usually have different versions downloadable. Another problem: due to space constraints some Laptops use reverse Cable Select. The Laptop in effect tells the drive to be Master but the drive interprets this as Slave - which is the way it is supposed to be, weird as it is.

So, a quick check via google reveals that the Solo1200 uses regular Slimline drives which have to be encoded as Master. All Panasonic / Matshita drives fall into this category.